Pizza & a Movie #72: "The Terminator"
"Hey, I think this guy's a couple cans short of a six-pack."
“The Terminator”
1984 • R • 1h 47mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
👁️🐝↩️ I’ll Be Back: A Terminator & T2 Double-Feature
Sensitive Topics: This movie contains several sequences of conspiracy-driven shootings in public places. To be blunt, they’ll remind you of workplace and school shootings. Watch accordingly and take care of yourself.
You’re reading Pizza & a Movie—rewinding the stories of rental classics. We begin a Double Feature I’m calling I’ll Be Back, a two-parter with The Terminator and T2: Judgement Day. Tonight we find ourselves on the run from the future in the form of an Austrian-inflected biker-booted man-machine. No metal guts, no glory. It’s James Cameron’s 1984 landmark of sci-fi, The Terminator.
Here’s the plot. We’re in LA, the 1984 present, and the same thing happens twice. Two fellas, both buck naked, appear at the center of highly localized electrical storms. For the first time in history, it’s raining men. Both steal clothes and guns, 50% of which is a rational response to nude time travel. We soon learn the first arrival (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is a cybernetic assassin, a Terminator, sent from the year 2029 to kill an unsub called Sarah Connor. The second is human, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn). He hopes to save her first. Sarah herself (Linda Hamilton), meanwhile, is having a rough Friday night but is gloomily unaware the two are closing in.
The nightly news gets Sarah’s attention first. They say cops are tracking the work of a new serial killer—the Terminator—who’s offing all the Sarah Connorses in LA in phone book order. Spooked, Sarah notices a shady character tailing her. She ducks into a club for safety, but the ‘Nator with is variety pack of firearms follows too. Reese saves her from a bullet at the last second, returning fire at the cyborg. But the baddy gets up, unfazed. Reese and Sarah go on the run. But can they stay a step ahead of the murderous linebacker robot? Will they live long enough to save the future? And will Sarah ever get her security deposit back on her apartment?
James Cameron’s Bad Day
You’ve seen Terminator. But what is it? Action flick? Sci-fi? Dystopian cautionary tale? Whatever it ended up as, James Cameron set out to make a horror movie. Why? Let’s go back in time to find out.
The year is 1982. Cameron is in Rome and he doesn’t feel good. Two reasons. First, he has a fever. It could be the tough production of Piranha 2: The Spawning (’82), his directorial debut, catching up with him. Piranha 2 wasn’t what he was hoping for. They gave him the job because the director of the first one was busy with better projects. But, when you’re starting, out you take what you can get. Cameron had been a special effects artist but always saw bigger things for himself. At least the fish movie made him friends with Lance Henriksen, who would act as his Terminator prototype later.
The second reason Cameron feels bad is because his contemporaries—John Carpenter, Steven Spielberg, et al.—were launching their careers, changing cinema as they did. While Cameron languished in Piranha 2, Spielberg had already made jaw-dropping Jaws (’75). Carpenter had hatched Halloween (’78) for a measly $30k. The stylish horror flick was everything Cameron’s career wasn’t—innovative, memorable, clever. Cameron was 28 and surely felt 30 breathing down his neck. He’d never get where he wanted to go by taking what Hollywood would give him. He needed his own haunting Halloween, his own unstoppable Jaws. He needed a cheap, groundbreaking horror movie.
While in Rome, sick as a dog in body and heart, Cameron had a nightmare. The kind you really only get on a fever. He saw a wall of fire. And out of it crawled the upper half of hell’s lower depths—a machine with a skull-like visage, crawling toward him, dragging only a torso behind. A machine that wouldn’t stop. It scared the pantaloni off him and didn’t make his fever any better. But it did cure what ailed his career. Now Cameron had both a concept and the gut feeling that it would scare everyone else who saw it just as much as it did him. He was swimming to land and his Piranha days were over.
Look, nobody gets anywhere without an unfair advantage. Maybe it’s generational wealth. Maybe your power’s favorite hue at the time. Maybe you opened the right door on a Tuesday morning. Or maybe you woke up with the best idea ever and already have the VFX chops to execute on it. So it was with James Cameron, whose background in stop-motion, miniatures, makeup and monsters suddenly became the key fitting awfully nicely into the previously locked door before him. Cameron got help writing his movie from a sci-fi author friend, cut a deal with a producer contact, and was off to the races. He’d make choices in setting up Terminator that would echo for the rest of his career.
One of them was foregrounding his foes. Schwarzenegger’s T-800 is both the title and the star of Terminator. And if the titular xenomorph was important to Ridley Scott’s Alien (’79), that was nothing to how critical and far more developed our multiple-mouthed pals were in Cameron’s Aliens (’86). He’d do it again in what I think is one of the low-key cleverest titled movies: T2, which featured two Terminators just like the title promises. Shoot, he named his movie Titanic (’97) after that flick’s villain which is, of course, the ship itself.
Making a Terminator
Cameron’s got his story. But he needs his hero. What’s a guy gotta do to hire a Kyle Reese around here? During the casting process—at, I think, the studio’s urging—Cameron met with Arnold Schwarzenegger for the part. Schwarzenegger was making Conan the Destroyer (’84) at the time, sequel to Conan the Barbarian (’82). Cameron hates the idea of Arnold playing his lead. He even plans ruses to get out of casting him before the meeting. But then the unexpected happens. They kinda sorta like each other.
While Schwarzenegger doesn’t like the movie itself, he has an interesting take on the bad guy. At one point during the meeting, Cameron asks Arnold to sit still so he can sketch him like one of his French girls for his notes. Cameron sees a savvy and range to the big lunk he doesn’t expect; Schwarzenegger sees an ambitious young man who reminds him of, I dunno, roughly a third of himself? Said the director, he’s not my Reese but “he'd make a hell of a Terminator”.
When Cameron came back to look for his big-bad, Schwarzenegger took the part for two reasons. First, the role was really different from Conan. He’d trade dialogue and choreography for stony-faced stomping. While Conan is a fighter, the T-800 is an inelegant bruiser. The actor didn’t want to be pegged as a swords-and-scandals guy. Cameron’s sci-fi picture would make for a fun change of pace. Second, Terminator was such a small potatoes movie that Arnie didn’t think it would hurt his career if it tanked. That’s the honest truth. It wasn’t until he saw the first twenty minutes of an early edit that he saw potential. “This could be bigger than we all think,” he would later say.
Unstoppable Force, Unmovable Object
There’s only one developing character in this story. Both Kyle Reese and the Terminator die as they lived—single-mindedly on-mission. But over the runtime our heroine, Sarah Connor, goes from a woman adrift in the choppy seas of her twenties to one tough lady. Half an hour in, she’s going to the movies by herself on a Friday night. Six months later, she’s in a Jeep driving into the storm while plotting a revolution with her unborn kid.
Where’s all that change coming from? There are three answers.
Answer one: It’s gotta be Reese.
Sarah is hunted by two mean-faced meatheads. One bad, one good. It’s an ordeal. Kyle Reese catches up with her, scoops her up, tells her about the future. He changes everything for her. Right?
Hang on, there’s more.
Answer two: John Connor.
Later, Reese fesses up. Sarah’s future son John made him memorize the message he gave her. John also uh very weirdly orchestrated Reese’s crush on Sarah, ensuring Reese would volunteer to go back in time to save her when the moment came. I guess I’d pull a few strings if my conception were on the line too. So it’s John, then. John Connor of the future changes his mom by reaching back across the years. Or does he?
Those horses you’re holding? Hold ‘em a little longer.
Answer three: The lady herself.
Reese says John was always quiet about his mom. Figured he either didn’t know her or doesn’t want to talk about her. Right before credits roll, we hear Sarah telling John via extremely-nostalgia-inducing-for-me tape recorder everything about the future—including that sending Reese back gets him born. So John knew, but his mom told him to keep a few secrets. I think she changes the moment she crushes the T-800 like a beer can. As his lights go out, hers turn on. So who turns Sarah’s dial from languish to legend? She herself, that’s who. Good thing that Terminator’s silver because Sarah Connor takes the gold for most unstoppable force in this movie.
Terminating the Box Office
Did Terminator score in ‘84? Distributor Orion had zero faith in Cameron’s freaky little movie. But they shouldn’t have worried. It opened on October 26, 1984 on a thousand screen. That meant Halloween chills were available in robot form that year. It’s the same calendar in which Gremlins and Ghostbusters came out, but those were back in early June.
Some critics liked it, some didn’t. Those who did found it exciting and didn’t mind the violence. Those who didn’t saw the cumbersome sci-fi wrapper as insufficient cover for all the bloodshed. The New York Times said “Arnold Schwarzenegger is about as well suited to movie acting as he would be to ballet”, but liked him in this anyway. The Chicago Tribune pointed out that Arnie made a better villain than he did even a Conan-style hero. The LA Times called it “a crackling thriller full of all sorts of gory treats”, which is a super gross phrase I’m already trying unsuccessfully to forget. It does remind me of the taking-out-the-eyeball scene, which made me squirm this viewing.
In a retrospective review seven years later, Entertainment Weekly said, “What originally seemed a somewhat inflated, if generous and energetic, big picture, now seems quite a good little film.” It does feel lean and mean now. And the notion that maybe AI gets the better of us someday hasn’t drained out of popular thought. We only think about it more now.
Though distributor Orion Pictures didn’t believe in it, Terminator made bank. It was number one for two straight weeks. Considering October fell squarely between summer blockbusters and winter Oscars-chasers and family-friendlies, there wasn’t much competition. Against a budget of $6.4M it took in $78M—a twelvefold return. But it didn’t just make money.
What The Terminator did
Cemented Schwarzenegger as a movie star
Made Cameron a bankable director
Changed the sci-fi genre
“I’ll be back” quoted for years, even Arnold’s other movies
Inducted in ‘08 into the Library of Congress’s US National Film Registry for preservation
Became the second-best movie in its own franchise
Next week we’ll be back (see what I did?) with the first-best entry: Terminator 2. Like the original, I haven’t seen it in many years. And I think, like this one, I only ever saw it on cable. I’m looking forward to pouring myself a piping hot cup of liquid metal and sitting down with Cameron’s follow-up. We’ll see if my memory that T2 outdoes the original is correct with part two of I’ll Be Back.
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this one. And hey, if you did, share it with someone else who would too! Give ‘em a night at Tech Noir they won’t soon forget.
NOTES:
Kyle Reese is supposed to be 25? It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
Cameron’s original concept for this movie involved two Terminators being sent back in time. One similar to this, one liquid metal. Sounds familiar.
At a pitch meeting, Cameron had pal Lance Henriksen show up early dressed as a Terminator. He kicked the door open, sat in somebody’s chair and waited. The biz guys ultra did not know what was happening, but Cameron closed that deal. Pretty hard to say know with a Terminator in the room, writing that down.
Almost Terminators: Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson, OJ Simpson. Sly and Mel turned it down, Cameron thought folks wouldn’t buy OJ as a killer. Just had to give it time, turns out.
I don’t think we’d have The Matrix if there wasn’t The Terminator.
Cameron invented the term “tech noir”, which he used to mean film noir plus science fiction. He thought of Blade Runner as sharing the category.
Cameron sold the rights for The Terminator for $1 on one condition. He be the guy to direct it.
The center punk in the scene where Arnie gets his clothes is a young Bill Paxton. Paxton and Biehn would return in Cameron’s Aliens a couple years later.
First-time producer Gale Ann Hurd had to defend the dark ending.
The Nikes Kyle Reese steals are Nike Vandals, baby brothers to AF1s.